Seminars and Colloquia by Series

Holomorphic curves in geometry and topology III

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Friday, September 16, 2011 - 14:00 for 2 hours
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
John Etnyre – Ga Tech

Please Note: Recall this is a 2 hour seminar (2-4).

This series of talks will be an introduction to the use of holomorphic curves in geometry and topology. I will begin by stating several spectacular results due to Gromov, McDuff, Eliashberg and others, and then discussing why, from a topological perspective, holomorphic curves are important. I will then proceed to sketch the proofs of the previously stated theorems. If there is interest I will continue with some of the analytic and gometric details of the proof and/or discuss Floer homology (ultimately leading to Heegaard-Floer theory and contact homology).

Holomorphic curves in geometry and topology II

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Friday, September 9, 2011 - 14:00 for 2 hours
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
John Etnyre – Ga Tech

Please Note: Recall this is a two hour seminar (2-4).

This series of talks will be an introduction to the use of holomorphic curves in geometry and topology. I will begin by stating several spectacular results due to Gromov, McDuff, Eliashberg and others, and then discussing why, from a topological perspective, holomorphic curves are important. I will then proceed to sketch the proofs of the previously stated theorems. If there is interest I will continue with some of the analytic and gometric details of the proof and/or discuss Floer homology (ultimately leading to Heegaard-Floer theory and contact homology).

Holomorphic curves in geometry and topology

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Friday, September 2, 2011 - 14:00 for 2 hours
Location
Skiles 006
Speaker
John Etnyre – Ga Tech

Please Note: Recall this is a two hour seminar (running from 2-4).

This series of talks will be an introduction to the use of holomorphic curves in geometry and topology. I will begin by stating several spectacular results due to Gromov, McDuff, Eliashberg and others, and then discussing why, from a topological perspective, holomorphic curves are important. I will then proceed to sketch the proofs of the previously stated theorems. If there is interest I will continue with some of the analytic and gometric details of the proof and/or discuss Floer homology (ultimately leading to Heegaard-Floer theory and contact homology).

Spaces of nonnegatively curved metrics II

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Friday, April 8, 2011 - 14:05 for 2 hours
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Igor Belegradek – Georgia Tech
I will prove contractibility of the space of nonnegatively curved metrics on the 2-sphere via the uniformization, discuss difficulties of extending the result to metrics on the plane, and then discuss similar problems in higher dimensions.

Spaces of nonnegatively curved metrics

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Friday, April 1, 2011 - 14:05 for 2 hours
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Igor Belegradek – Georgia Tech
The talk will be about my ongoing work on spaces of complete non-negatively curved metrics on low-dimensional manifolds, such as Euclidean plane, 2-sphere, or their product.

A Filtration of the Magnus Representation

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Friday, March 4, 2011 - 14:00 for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Taylor McNeill – Rice University
While orientable surfaces have been classified, the structure of their homeomorphism groups is not well understood. I will give a short introduction to mapping class groups, including a description of a crucial representation for these groups, the Magnus representation. In addition I will talk about some current work in which I use Johnson-type homomorphisms to define an infinite filtration of the kernel of the Magnus representation.

Tangent lines and torsion of closed space curves

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Friday, February 25, 2011 - 14:00 for 2 hours
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Mohammad Ghomi – Ga Tech
Torsion of a curve in Euclidean 3-space is a quantity which together with the curvature completely determines the curve up to a rigid motion. In this talk we use the curve shortening flow to show that the number of zero torsion points (or vertices) v a closed space curve c and the number p of the pair of parallel tangent lines of c satisfy the following sharp inequality: v + 2p > 5.

Generating Torelli groups

Series
Geometry Topology Working Seminar
Time
Friday, February 25, 2011 - 14:00 for 1.5 hours (actually 80 minutes)
Location
Skiles 269
Speaker
Dan Margalit – GaTech
I'll present a new, simple proof that the Torelli group is generated by (infinitely many) bounding pair maps. At the end, I'll explain an application of this approach to the hyperelliptic Torelli group. The key is to take advantage of the "complex of minimizing cycles."

Pages